Choosing an outboard engine for your tender used to be as simple as going to your nearest dealer and picking up whatever 2.5hp engine they had in stock. Now, however, things have got a bit more complicated – in a good way.
First you’ve got to decide whether you are going to stick with petrol or go electric, then there’s the question of who offers the best combination of power, range, weight, build quality, refinement, ease of use and, of course, price. You could go round in circles for hours trying to decide what was right for you. So that’s exactly what we did, on your behalf, by assembling all the main players along with one of F-RIB’s 2.75m folding mini-RIBs to test them on and work out which were the lightest, fastest, most user-friendly engines for your yacht’s tender.
Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha and Selva all provided petrol engines of 2.3-2.5hp for the test while Torqeedo and ePropulsion represented the electric alternatives.
Broadly speaking 1hp = ¾kW so you’d think an electric equivalent of 2.3-2.5hp would need to be 1.7-1.9kW, but the high torque of electric motors means they can often be of a lower power than that.
ePropulsion Spirit 1.0 Plus
Price: £1,650
Rating: ★★★★★
Chinese company ePropulsion is the (relatively) new electric kid on the
